Prosser a Man of Minimal Pretension

I spent an hour over breakfast with Skip Prosser in a hotel restaurant just two weeks ago tomorrow. We both avoided the fatty foods and sweets on the all-you-can-eat buffet, and discovered in the course of our chat that we were born two days apart in November 1950. We chuckled over the fact I was older. Now I always will be, because Prosser died suddenly on Thursday, reportedly in his Winston-Salem basketball office after returning from a jog.

I can’t say I knew the Wake Forest coach well, but our annual conversations, scheduled when our paths crossed during the summer recruiting season, were always cordial and relaxed. He was a man of minimal pretension, easygoing, thoughtful without a pressing need to flaunt his intelligence.

He was proud of his Pittsburgh roots, of having worked his way up through the ranks from freshman coach at Linsly Institute in Wheeling, West Virginia, to the helm of an ACC program. Lately he said his affection for Winston-Salem had deepened. “The more I’m down there, the more Winston reminds me of Pittsburgh,” he said, noting the city’s “blue-collar work ethic” and appreciation for hard work.

Prosser did not mind a challenging question. His recent Wake teams had been criticized for weak defense, a charge to which the coach pleaded guilty. He spoke hopefully of improving the squad’s rebounding in 2007-08, of returning to the “attacking, pressing” defense he employed at Xavier prior to taking the Wake job, and of making the Demon Deacons “relevant” again in the ACC.

I knew Prosser could be tough in practice, and I’d watched him storm on the sidelines. But I wondered aloud whether he might be too unintimidating to succeed in his profession, lacking that peculiar trait of insistent unpleasantness – often defined by reference to a body part linked to excretory functions -- that seems to characterize most winners. As examples, I cited a pair of genial ACC coaching failures of recent vintage, N.C. State coach Les Robinson and Virginia’s Pete Gillen, for whom Prosser worked at Xavier and to whom he still referred as “Coach.”

“There’s merit to that argument,” Prosser admitted. He preferred, he said, the formulation offered by Bob Knight, the surly Texas Tech coach with more major college victories to his credit than anyone in history. “Knight says the best teachers are the most intolerant,” Prosser said. He didn’t clarify whether he placed himself in that category despite a career winning percentage of .666 (291-146), .649 in six seasons at Wake Forest.

The Deacons finished first in the ACC under Prosser in 2003, and he was selected the league’s coach of the year. Last season was the only time Prosser posted a losing record at Wake (15-16) or failed to reach postseason play. He is the only coach in NCAA history who went to the NCAAs in his first year at three different schools – Loyola of Baltimore in 1994, Xavier in 1995, and Wake in 2001.

Conversations with Prosser, a former high school history teacher, often ranged beyond basketball. He was an inveterate reader. Last year we met for lunch in Indianapolis along with Ed DeChellis, the head coach at Penn State, and Prosser spoke glowingly of “Team of Rivals,” Doris Kearns Goodwin’s fascinating book analyzing the adroit manner in which Abraham Lincoln managed the inner tensions of his Civil War-era Cabinet.

More recently, Prosser’s reading was heavy on sports, he told me in North Augusta, Georgia, where we attended the Peach Jam tournament. The event is staged annually by Nike during a live recruiting period, allowing coaches a chance to survey teams of talented teens who will soon populate college basketball rosters. Prosser was especially relaxed and chipper, having learned the previous day that two highly recruited prospects, frontcourt players Al Farouq Aminu and Tony Woods, had announced they intended to enroll at Wake Forest for the 2008-09 season.

Prosser spoke well of several books -- Will Blythe’s “To Hate Like This Is To Be Happy Forever,” which deepened his insight into the Duke-North Carolina basketball rivalry and the ACC generally; Mike Pressler’s and Don Yaeger’s apologia for the fired Duke lacrosse coach, “It’s Not About the Truth,” which Prosser found sobering and revealing, if one-sided; and “The Man Watching,” Tim Crothers’ book on UNC women’s soccer coach Anson Dorrance from which he garnered a “lot of coaching nuggets.”

Prosser also was quite enthusiastic about his late-May visit to Kuwait to participate in Operation Hardwood, a USO-sponsored tour that brings eight male college coaches annually to Camp Navistar, a military base near the border with Iraq. “I would be honored to do it again,” he said.

This year’s coaching contingent was heavy on men with ACC connections: Notre Dame’s Mike Brey, formerly a Duke assistant; The Citadel’s Ed Conroy, formerly an N.C. State assistant; Georgia’s Dennis Felton, formerly a Clemson assistant; Jimmy Patsos, formerly a Maryland assistant; and Prosser. There is only one gym, and for a week the coaches live in the barracks, get to drive tanks and other military vehicles, trade coaching yarns and stratagems, and direct 10-member, coed squads that eagerly practice outdoors in 140 degree temperatures.

A tournament is held, and Prosser’s team won this year’s championship. He, like other coaches who have participated such as Maryland’s Gary Williams, marveled at how hard his players worked, how passionate they were about the game. “One of the amazing things is how grateful they are,” Prosser said of soldiers the same age as his Wake Forest charges.

Now it is our turn to be grateful, in this case for the brief time Prosser was among us.

Several ACC basketball coaches have collapsed during recent seasons and required hospitalization. Maryland’s Bob Wade crumpled due to exhaustion while being interviewed in an Atlanta arena hallway after upsetting top-seed N.C. State in the 1989 ACC Tournament. The Wolfpack’s Sidney Lowe faded due to illness at halftime of a game at the Smith Center in Chapel Hill this past February.

Yet, despite the pressure-packed nature of the profession, and the age range of men who advance to become ACC basketball coaches, none has previously died while actively directing a program.

George Edward Prosser’s precipitous death at age 56 is a first no one wanted. Later we can contemplate the impact on the Wake Forest basketball program and on the ACC. For now, we can only share the sorrow of his wife, Nancy, reportedly out of town when Prosser died, and of sons Scott and Mark.